In The Line Of Fire

Conservatives, who have long considered the NEA an obstacle to
reform, like some of Chase's rhetoric, but wonder if it is all just
a publicity stunt.

Ironically, it was Keith Geiger, the outgoing NEA president, who
pointed the way for a new NEA in his final speech to the 9,000
delegates gathered in Washington, D.C., in July 1996. Geiger urged the
union members to use collective bargaining as a "sledgehammer" to knock
down the "Berlin Wall . . . blocking change and reform," and he touted
the peer-review program in Columbus as a model of labor-management
cooperation. "Now, I grant you," Geiger said, "this is a brave new
world for the NEA. And, by all means, let us be brave in embracing
it."

The next day, Chase was elected president of the 2.3 million-member
organization, taking roughly 60 percent of the delegate votes. In his
first address as union leader, Chase pledged "to move this great
association in bold, creative, and, if necessary, uncomfortable
directions," and he promised to advocate a "New Unionism, with
contracts that empower and enable our members in new ways."

But it wasn't until seven months later, in his press club speech,
that Chase outlined his vision for a dramatically different NEA. He
billed his prepared remarks as "A New Approach to Teacher Unionism:
It's Not Your Mother's NEA." The speech, he admits, was a deliberate
attempt to "grab attention."

"There were some things I said in that speech that were intended to
create debate," he says. "There were some people here"—inside the
NEA bureaucracy—"who advised me not to use the term 'bad
teachers.' And I said, 'Sorry, but I'm going to do it.' Now, the number
of bad teachers is small. But if the president of the NEA said, 'There
are some folks in our classrooms who aren't doing a particularly good
job'—yawn. Or, 'There are some teachers who need to get some
help'—yawn. So I used those words very intentionally, and not
just for an external audience, but for an internal audience, as
well."

He adds: "I don't mean to sound Machiavellian, because when I say
those things, I mean them. They aren't just designed to provoke."

If Chase meant to stir the pot, he certainly did so. Conservatives,
who have long considered the NEA an obstacle to reform, liked some of
the union leader's rhetoric, but they wondered if it was all just a
publicity stunt. The union traditionalists—like the state leaders
in Wisconsin and the dissidents in Los Angeles—saw Chase's
comments as counterproductive, a threat to union solidarity. Others
wondered why it had taken the NEA so long to get with the program.

So what prompted the press club speech? For one thing, the
Republicans had made the NEA an issue during the 1996 presidential
election. Candidate Bob Dole attacked the union every chance he got,
portraying it as a liberal special-interest group concerned only with
power, not pupils. In his speech accepting the Republican presidential
nomination—which came just a few weeks after Chase took
office—Dole lambasted the "teachers' unions," which has become a
code phrase for the NEA. (Conservatives, many of whom admired Albert
Shanker for his common-sense approach to school reform, tend not to
bad-mouth the AFT.) "If education were a war," Dole said, "you'd be
losing it; if it were a patient, it would be dying. When I am
president, I will disregard your political power for the sake of the
children, the schools, and the nation."

Chase, who was at the Republican national convention in Chicago,
says he was "taken aback" by Dole's remarks, even though he'd heard the
candidate say much the same thing during the campaign. "He made a very
big mistake," Chase says. "Politically, it didn't resonate with the
majority of the American public." What Dole's comments did do was put
the NEA in the spotlight, allowing the newly elected union president to
get his message out. "That might not have been as easy to do," he says,
"if we had not been in the position of having to respond to these
attacks."

'Public education made the difference in my life.'

Bob Chase

Then there was the so-called Kamber Report. In the fall of 1996, the
NEA hired the Kamber Group, a Washington, D.C.-based consulting firm
with ties to the labor movement and the Democratic Party, to analyze
the union's public image and communications apparatus. The result was a
43-page report titled An Institution at Risk. (The allusion to A
Nation at Risk, the landmark 1983 report on the state of public
education in America, was quite intentional.) Submitted to the NEA last
January, it was promptly leaked to the press.

The report paints a picture of a union in crisis. The NEA, it
asserts, has come under "increasing and unrelenting attack" by
"anti-government ideologues who believe the private sector does
everything better, by anti-labor zealots who jump on every opportunity
to bash unions, by CEOs who seek profits from educating our children,
and by religious extremists who equate education with Satan."

In the face of these assaults, the report goes on to say, the NEA
initially chose not to respond at all. And when it did, the response
was "often negative, and lacking a succinct message."

"What NEA faces now is a crisis," the report states. "But one cannot
handle a crisis in a business-as-usual mode. And despite its best
intentions, the NEA continues to operate in a business-as-usual
mode."

The report urges the union to go on the offensive with a two-year
campaign, to be titled, "Better teachers, better students, better
public schools." The initiative "will be the means of shifting NEA's
approach from that of an industrial union to one that embraces
attributes of craft unionism, in which ensuring quality workers is just
as important as raising wages and benefits at the bargaining table."
The campaign "should be launched in a speech by President Chase in
which he acknowledges the crisis, says some things for their shock
value to open up the audience's minds (e.g., there are bad teachers,
and our job is to make them good or show the way to another career),
and then details the Association's substantive programs to improve
public schools—those already in existence and those that will be
expanded or launched in the months ahead."

NEA critics seized on the report. To them, it simply confirmed what
they had long suspected: that the union's reform efforts are more
public relations than substance. But Chase insists that isn't the case.
The report, he says, merely "validated the direction we were already
going. . . . It makes it clear that if the NEA is going to change, then
it can't be just smoke and mirrors. It has to be substantive stuff.
It's not just a PR thing. I mean, it's been a great tool. But the
platform I ran on as a candidate was based on this stuff, and that was
before the Kamber Report."

Still, the NEA seems to have taken many of the report's proposals to
heart. For whatever reason, the union chose not to adopt the "better
schools, better students, better public schools" campaign. But Chase's
New Unionism agenda has served much the same purpose. And the union
president apparently followed the report's specific recommendation that
he launch the new initiative in a speech designed for its "shock
value." Even the phrase "bad teachers" comes right out of the
report.

On the other hand, it's likely that the report never would have been
commissioned in the first place if Chase had not seen the writing on
the wall. "It would have been irresponsible for him not to have done
something," says Jan Noble, president of the Colorado Springs Education
Association and a Chase supporter.

Chase's leadership was first tested at the NEA's annual meeting,
where he overcame long-standing opposition to peer review of
teacher peformance.

The report itself acknowledges that "given the changes under way over
the last year, this report does not suggest a radical shift—just
swifter and greater movement in the same direction. . . . President
Chase believes the very notion of public education as we know it is
under attack and, taken to its logical conclusion, that means the very
nature/existence of the NEA is being challenged. This point of view was
shared—indeed, usually volunteered—by most of the NEA
leaders and staff whom we interviewed."

Chase's first test as NEA president came last summer, at the union's
annual representative assembly in Atlanta. He urged the delegates to
adopt a resolution reversing the NEA's longtime opposition to the
concept of peer review. After a spirited debate lasting nearly two
hours, the resolution passed by voice vote, despite loud opposition
from the union's California, New Jersey, and Wisconsin affiliates. The
measure spells out specific guidelines that locals are urged to follow
if they wish to adopt such a program.

"This is a defining moment," high school teacher Lea Schelke told a
reporter from Education Week after the vote. "It shifts the world for
our new members. They appreciate all of us old workhorses who got the
salaries and protections they don't want to walk away from—but
they want more."

W hen Bob Chase says, "Public education made the difference in my
life," he isn't just saying it for effect. Born in 1942 in his
grandmother's house in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, Chase grew up in a
poor household with two brothers and two sisters. His father, a
laborer, worked at various blue-collar jobs, while his mother spent
most of her life working in a candle factory.

"It was tough," Chase says. "My folks didn't have very much. There
were five kids, and my parents struggled. It's a very common story from
that period in history. It's nothing unique or different from thousands
of other folks. No one in our family had gone to college. Two of my
siblings didn't finish high school." In fact, Chase was the only member
of his family to graduate from college. "I was just lucky," he
says.

But luck was only part of the equation. At Dennis-Yarmouth Regional
High School, Chase came under the influence of a teacher by the name of
Alan Carlsen. Last summer, at the representative assembly in Atlanta,
Chase introduced his former teacher at the end of his keynote address.
"He was my English teacher in high school and my track coach for four
years," Chase told the assembled delegates. "He helped me believe in
myself. A good teacher like Alan Carlsen has the unique ability to be
both demanding and encouraging. A good teacher like Alan Carlsen knows
how tough it can be to be a kid, how discouraged kids can become, how
ashamed of failure, how sensitive to adult opinion they are. A good
teacher like Alan Carlsen knows when you're slacking off, and lets you
know that he knows. But he keeps encouraging you. He builds you up and
never tears you down. He knows when to reach out to a confused and
uncertain kid, as Alan Carlsen did to me."

Chase still remembers what he calls "the defining moment" of his
life: when Carlsen asked him, "Bobby, have you ever thought about being
a teacher?"

"Until that moment," Chase says, "it never had occurred to me that I
had the ability to enter a profession as respected as teaching. So Alan
Carlsen is the reason I became a teacher. There's no question in my
mind."

But it didn't happen right away. After graduating from high school,
Chase decided he wanted to become a priest. "I grew up Catholic," he
says. "The church was a rock, stability. Parish priests were important
people, a stable influence." But during his two years at the seminary,
Chase couldn't get Carlsen's question out of his mind, and eventually
he concluded that teaching was, in fact, his calling. And he never
looked back.

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